


hell on wheels, he’s got the devil at his heels

by ninemoons42



Series: temptation [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Challenge Response, Disguise, Established Relationship, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, Inspired by The Rose of Versailles, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, Rogue One - some of them live, Tumblr Prompt, Undercover Missions, at least in terms of what Cassian is wearing, kicking ass in all his finery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 15:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10310972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: This time, Jyn and Leia send Cassian in to do the undercover work -- and he gets to dress up in order to do so.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beth Winter (BethWinter)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethWinter/gifts).



Jyn’s part of the mission was supposed to be the hardest part -- after all, in these days after the fiery demise of a Death Star, you’d expect the Imperials to start looking into their security systems, to start locking down their comms, to be even more paranoid about the whole fact that the Rebel Alliance is fighting back in every possible way. 

Fighting back not just for the sake of staying alive, but because it’s growing in leaps and bounds, with more and more systems rallying to the cause championed by no less than Leia Organa of martyred Alderaan, a Princess who saw her world blasted to ash and turned right around to keep on fighting.

Jyn would have had a lot of things to say about a woman placed in a position like that, if it weren’t for the part where Leia often cries and rails and makes terrifying plans when she’s got a few glasses of Corellian whiskey in her -- whiskey that Jyn has like as not procured for her, for the express purpose of giving her that brief respite from the chains of leadership.

Anyway, Leia is quietly speaking into her ear, and they had been apprehensive at the beginning of this mission and now that has to be the sound of the Princess twisting open a bottle of something, or Jyn is going to eat her boots. 

“What happened to being careful,” she mutters into the commlink hidden inside her grimy collar, a little resentfully. Her pockets are weighed down with a couple of heavy hydrospanners and the parts for a quick-to-assemble blaster, but she’s got her hands right out in the open, with no one in the hangar to be a threat or to be a hindrance.

“Of course I’m being careful,” is Leia’s answer. “I have a flask. Or Artoo was carrying the flask for me and now he and I are in this corner and no one is looking at us.”

“Must be convenient, to be able to disguise yourself as a -- tech, or a pilot, or something,” Jyn says.

“I do have my face splashed all over the galaxy -- I need to know how to stay hidden.”

“Yes.” The word is a fervent sigh. Jyn ducks her head when a couple of tall humanoids hurries past, in pressed and starched flight suits. “This one.”

“That looks nice,” Leia agrees, and Jyn nods, though the Princess won’t be able to see her. Only the view that she’s broadcasting by way of the tiny holocamera disguised as a button on her shirt. 

She steps up to the sleek cruiser. Doesn’t pretend to admire its lethal and graceful lines. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

“And I want what it’s got inside,” Leia says.

“Pretty impatient of you,” Jyn snickers, but she does make the leisurely detour around to the cruiser’s cargo hold. 

The two starfighters within bear more than a passing resemblance to the ships that Naboo had once been famous for, with perhaps a touch more firepower, and Jyn’s hands twitch, wanting to get her hands on the controls. Wanting to look at the insides of the engines and the weapons systems.

As though Leia were standing right there with her, she hears, “Later. Boost that first, get it all back here, and then you know you’re getting first crack at them. Yes?”

“Right.”

“Get in position,” Leia says, after a moment. “Your distraction’s almost ready -- ”

“Oh, right, you’re telling me he has to cut out the fun and start working,” Jyn chuckles.

And right on cue, the third voice on the link: “Spoilsports. Both of you.”

Leia laughs outright.

There’s no way Jyn can see Cassian, not when the hangar she’s in is literally a hundred levels below the ballroom that he’s supposed to be entering now, but he is wearing a commlink that’s designed to pick up a lot of whispers and a lot of coded transmissions, so she can hear the rustle and the swish of the outfit he’s been given to wear -- and maybe it’s her ears playing tricks on her, but he sounds not just surefooted and capable. He sounds like he’s completely comfortable. He sounds like he’s ready for anything.

The whispers of hem and sleeve as he walks forward. The tread of his feet in well-fitting boots -- how can she tell? There are no slapping sounds, no creaking, no squeaking, to give away the marks of wear and tear. No marks of wear and tear means very new and very precisely measured boots. New boots, just for him, just for this mission. 

“I take it back,” Leia says, “you were right about wearing dark boots with that. It doesn’t look Imperial at all.”

“It looks better than anything the Imperials could ever have designed,” is Cassian’s reply, and he sounds like he might be swaggering, just a little.

“Oh, shut up and straighten your shoulders,” is the laughing reply.

Jyn bites at the inside of her cheek, and silently curses Leia, because she has an actual view of Cassian, where Artoo’s hacking into the security system feeds. 

“Tell me what he looks like,” Jyn hears herself say. Almost plead.

“No,” Leia says, and laughs some more. “You’re supposed to be meeting him anyway, whether this thing goes well or not. I’m not spoiling the surprise.”

“Kriff you.”

More laughter.

“Language,” Cassian admonishes.

“Don’t you start.” Jyn sneaks onto the cruiser. There’s a droid looking askance at her in its charging alcove. It’s scrubbed clean and sleek like this ship and its cargo, but there is also a tiny starbird symbol etched into one of the focusing rings around its eyepiece, and when it sees her it rolls forward and pops a side-hatch, and beeps at her.

“Got the data cards,” Jyn says. “Waiting on scan information,” she says, and just like that the mission’s back on.

Leia clears her throat. “Cassian? Your target’s about to enter the ballroom.”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here.”

“Safe flights, both of you.”

And so: Jyn has nothing to do but wait.

Nothing to do but listen: and she can hear the long, deep breath that Cassian takes, the controlled exhale, the determined meter of his advancing steps. He sounds, she thinks, like moving determination: the grit and the courage of an army on the move. He is an army, in and of himself, and she knows that from practical bloodstained experience. Three years, has it really been three years? Three years of running and fighting and stealing and sneaking, most of the time by his side so she knows what he looks like when he’s about to win and when he’s about to turn the tide of a loss into something very like a stalemate. She knows what he looks like when he’s making plans, and when those plans get turned onto their heads -- as they so often do.

She knows what he looks like when she’s saving his life. What he looks like when he’s saving hers.

And, in the private moments, the few-and-far-between breathers between running away from the enemy and running toward them once again: she knows what he looks like when he’s sleeping. When the lines in his face are smoothed out, and when he looks just a little bit unguarded, and when he looks like he might just have found a semblance of peace and home.

So the fact that she can’t see what he looks like right now, when he’s busy running his part of the mission and making her wait to complete hers, makes her grind her teeth. 

“Easy,” Cassian murmurs, very softly, and she can just about make him out over the strains of elaborate tinkling music, over the soaring singing voice of whoever is performing in that ballroom.

“Get here,” she says, and she pretends to look over the cruiser because the droid is sending fake information that says it might be having hyperdrive problems, which means she’s allowed to close the whole thing up. Hiding in plain sight, underneath lax Imperial eyes.

(More fool them, she thinks, too arrogant, too stupid. Too overconfident.)

(She thinks of the smug smirk that had been smashed off the face of Orson Krennic by a shot in the back, and smiles.)

“Be right there,” Cassian says.

“Transmissions,” Leia warns, suddenly.

Jyn creeps carefully to the cockpit. Steady hands, as she plugs the data cards into the sockets that the droid by her side helpfully indicates. She may or may not be itching to fly this thing already. She wants to know how much power its engines can put out. She wants to throw this thing into the very teeth of a fight and come out the other side victorious, in a whirl of exploded Imps -- 

The display on one of the co-pilot’s panels lights up, and she cuts her eyes in its direction, trying to parse the rapid-flowing information -- and some of it might be useful to people other than herself. Right now, she’s looking for maps, for the places where the Imperials cache their materiel and their weapons, and she nods, rapidly, as soon as she spots the series of images that Bodhi had warned her about. “Got Rook’s locations confirmed. Better tell Solo to light his ship up,” she mutters into her commlink. “He’s going to like those places. Spice, and several supporters of the Hutts.”

Leia snorts. “Looking for a way to get me off base, Erso?”

“I’m not the one who barges into my quarters complaining about wanting to get into the action,” Jyn snaps back, smiling though there’s no one to see it.

“I do not barge,” Leia says, archly. “I enter with force.”

Jyn claps a hand over her mouth to stifle her guffaw. “Yes. With force. You still owe me for breaking my door.”

She can hear Leia draw a deep breath, maybe for a retort or an obscenity, but it never comes: because suddenly there’s an angry hiss on the comms.

Leia snaps, “Status!”

“Complications,” is the laconic reply. Cassian still has that cool and level voice of his, damn him. No way of telling if he’s -- all right. If he’s uninjured. 

Jyn clenches her fists. “Ready for getaway any time.”

“I will take you up on that,” Cassian says. “Top of the blue tower as fast as you can.”

“Moving now. Leia, get ready for transmissions from this thing,” Jyn says. “Tell Flight we’re on our way.”

“Fly safe,” is the Princess’s response, then the click of silence.

“Passengers?” Jyn asks, directing the question to the droid beside her.

Negative beeps.

“Same question,” she adds, to the only other person now on the commlink.

“If this one doesn’t get to the landing pad alive -- then it’s just me,” and Cassian sounds so innocent that her eyes narrow. 

“Ask questions first, kill later,” she says.

“Of course.”

Again that measured tread of his feet. Again the whispers of his clothes. The sounds are coming faster. She can hear the controlled way Cassian inhales and exhales, and she knows he’s on the run. She can hear the cursing, a few choice phrases, and she knows he’s very preoccupied.

She can hear the quiet but prolonged ripping sound and she’s never seen what he’s wearing, only knows it had to be something fine for Leia to have had the reaction that she did, and Jyn regrets that Cassian’s had to tear at some of his clothes to access the weapons hidden in the linings and the special pockets.

The cruiser literally leaps into the skies at her barest touch on the controls, and for just a moment she loses herself in the exhilaration of stealing this beautiful thing, of flying it past all those unsuspecting Imps and local authorities -- 

The blue tower is in sight, and she pushes the flight levers forward to maximum sublight thrust, and then the cruiser brakes to a smooth stop and the door into the tower is flying open --

She stares.

In the powerful wash of the wind atop the tower, a length of white works its way out of long dark waves of hair -- flies off like a brave dash -- Cassian’s hair seems to be falling askew but no, it’s a wig, he was wearing a dark wig, long hair falling past his shoulders. 

Her gaze is fixed on his outfit, in shades of cream and gold: pale the shirt that buttons all the way up and conceals his throat from view, tucked into matching breeches. Heavy swirling gold on the elaborate coat that flares out with his every movement, stirred in the wind and the energetic pace of the way he’s running. Dark dark stains on the very sleeves of that coat, and she’s almost certain she knows what those stains are -- 

She smashes at the button that opens one of the passenger hatches, and Cassian all but bounds in, triumph and tension warring in the lines of his face as he throws himself into the co-pilot’s station and straps in.

Blink. The dark stains on his sleeves are matched by the dark smear on his cheek.

“Are you hurt?” she snaps, as her hands move and the cruiser purrs happily, whirling effortlessly up and up as it makes for upper atmo.

“Not mine,” Cassian says, and when he sighs, she cuts a glance his way and he’s only shaking his head at his coat. “It was a good coat.”

On the tip of her tongue, the question: “What are you wearing?”

And she only gets to ask it after she’s bluffed her way into hyperspace, Cassian breathing quietly and evenly beside her.

More than just the metallic reek of blood in the air, now: she smells the fragrant smoke of briefly burning aromatic wood. The sweet rasp of ocean salt.

She checks the nav computer, and the droid that had helped her steal the cruiser chirps reassurance. 

“Make sure you’re sending the signal that Leia sent us,” she says to it, to another happy affirmative.

Jyn gets to her feet. Crosses to Cassian, and looks.

For his part, he bears her scrutiny calmly, wilingly. There are no lines in his face as he looks back at her.

Now that the wind is no longer blowing at his clothes he’s an impression of beauty, suddenly, despite the traces of death: the mostly pristine clothes, the polished boots. His moustache and beard, carefully barbered. She thinks maybe the decorations on his shirt and his coat -- suit him. Gild him. 

She’s tempted to tell him so. Snaps her teeth down on the words.

Instead she reaches out with a trembling hand. Touches the stark angle of his jaw -- he sighs, leans into her fingertips -- she flings herself into his arms, throws herself into his kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> ALSO written for Prompt Six: "temptation" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr -- this is the promised flipside fic to [hell on wheels, she's got looks that could kill](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10235942)!!!!
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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